Non-volatile memory systems, such as flash memory, have been widely adopted for use in consumer products. Flash memory may be found in different forms, for example in the form of a portable memory card that can be carried between host devices or as a solid state disk (SSD) embedded in a host device. Flash memory is often made up of groups of memory cells referred to as pages, and multiple pages are often then organized in groups known as blocks. Flash memory cells may be physically configured to store data in different bit per cell densities.
Data security is often a high priority to users of memory systems. The ability to provide secure files or secure partitions in a non-volatile memory is an advantage, but there may still be data preservation and access issues, for example the susceptibility of secure data in a file or partition to erasure via formatting of a file system by someone who does not have access rights to the secure data.